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LLVM Continues To Dominate Across Many Operating Systems, Software Projects

In case you haven't realized it yet, LLVM is relied upon by quite the number of software projects both open and closed. LLVM continues making new leaps and bounds not just as a traditional C/C++ compiler but in other innovative areas as well.

Tilmann Scheller, a compiler engineer for Samsung's Open-Source Group / Samsung Research UK, presented at this weekend's FOSDEM conference in Brussels about where LLVM is being used today. This isn't anything entirely new, and much of it has been covered on places like Phoronix in the past with all of the innovative LLVM use-cases, but his PDF slide deck does a nice job of being a concise overview and highlighting the many areas where LLVM is utilized.

Companies from Microsoft to NVIDIA and Google rely upon LLVM and contribute upstream while Apple has been traditionally the one most well known for backing the project. AMD, Sony, Intel, Linaro, and IBM are among the many others.

Clang is well known as the C/C++ front-end to LLVM, but there is also language support for Swift, Haskell, Ruby, Python, Lisp, D, Go, Rust, Julia, and other languages. LLVM is also used for language runtime systems by projects like Microsoft's LLILC .NET compiler, Mono, and OpenJDK.

LLVM has also seen integration with various sanitizers for catching bad/faulty code, integration with development IDEs like Xcode and KDevelop and Qt Creator, and more. There is also LLVM implementations surrounding binary translation, symbolic execution, and more.

See Tilmann Scheller's slide deck for more examples of the wide ranging world of LLVM.

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 10,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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